Headstone City
A Novel
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“Tom Piccirilli is the master of the Southern gothic, quietly building horror where the chills grow with increasing strangeness.”—Denver Post
A haunted man must settle his accounts with the living—and the dead. . . .
The night Johnny Danetello drove a dying girl through the streets of Brooklyn in his cab, he was trying to save her life. Instead he ran down a cop and lost her and his freedom. Every day in prison, Johnny knew that Angie Monticelli’s family blamed him for her death, and that going home would be suicide. But Johnny has unfinished business with his former friend turned mob boss, Vinny Monticelli.
Now Johnny has returned to converse with the doomed and the dead—and wait for Vinny to make his move. Survivors of a long-ago freak accident, the two men share access to alternate realities no one else can know—and to a past and present that will all become the same in a city only one of them can leave alive. . . .
“In a genre where twisted souls and violence are the norm, Piccirilli’s work stands out for how it blends these elements with a literate sensibility.”—Publishers Weekly
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alternately funny, sad and thrilling, Piccirilli's stellar supernatural crime novel plays haunting riffs on old mob standards. The wise guys of Brooklyn welcome back cab driver Johnny "Dane" Danetello, fresh from two years in the slammer, with a contract on his life and a handful of restless ghosts. Burdened with the ability to see the dead, Dane spends time between fares chatting up spirits and spooks, trying to make sense of his precarious life on the outside. If his old pal (and partner in metaphysical enhancement) Vincent Monticelli wants Dane dead, why hasn't he been taken out? What does the gorgeous movie actress Glory Bishop want from him? Who's the federal lawman looking into the Monticelli family? These questions lead Dane to face his own haunted past, including a murdered father, a mother who lived and died in agony, and the beautiful young Angie Monticelli, who caught a ride to her death in Dane's cab two years earlier. Stoker-winner Piccirilli (A Choir of Ill Children) plays cleverly with his hero's paranormal ability, keeping the reader guessing and jumping by blurring distinctions between the living and the dead.
